ZANDVOORT, Netherlands -- Although Kimi Antonelli extended his lead at the top of Formula 1's drivers' championship following Sunday's Dutch Grand Prix, he left Zandvoort with one eye on the rearview mirror.
Two drivers are now tied for second place, his Mercedes teammate George Russell and Ferrari's Lewis Hamilton, both 59 points adrift of the 19-year-old Italian. But it's the progress of Lando Norris' McLaren, now in fourth place, that has caught Antonelli's attention.
"I mean, for sure, we're clearly not the fastest car anymore on the grid," Antonelli said after finishing second to Norris on Sunday. "We're probably second or third, at least in today's race, and McLaren has taken a huge step, especially since Hungary, since the big upgrade package they brought."
Norris' victory in the Netherlands represented back-to-back wins for the reigning champion on either side of F1's summer break, cutting his deficit to Antonelli to 83 points. The success has come off the back of a big push in upgrades before the summer break by his McLaren team, with new parts continuing to filter on to the car in Zandvoort.
In recent years, McLaren has exceled at bringing performance to its car during the season, providing a source of optimism for the remaining races; but with victory champagne still drying in his hair, Norris was reluctant to get overexcited.
Math vs. reality
While Norris' 83-point gap is a sizable number, it's still 21 points smaller than the one Max Verstappen had behind championship leader Oscar Piastri at the same point last year. Verstappen may not have gone on to win the title -- missing out by two points to Norris in the final reckoning -- but he did finish second and outscored Piastri by a total of 115 points in the races after Zandvoort.
But to assume Norris can do the same off the strength of his past two results remains a stretch. Speaking after his victory Sunday, the reigning champion was aware that his Hungaroring and Zandvoort form might be short-lived, especially as the F1 calendar shifts to a run of very different circuits in the coming months.
"I don't have the confidence to say, 'Yeah, I can easily fight for a championship for the rest of the season,'" Norris said. "I know I've just won two races in a row and had two poles in a row, but at the minute I don't have the car I need to fight for a championship.
"And I know that's quite a big comment, but I think last year I understood what is needed from a car and what was needed for myself. And I know the level that I am now and what I know I can perform at, and I know just what I need from the car. And I know what tracks we have coming up where we're going to certainly struggle more, and I don't want to struggle more.
"So I'm just doing my part to make sure, as a team, we don't relax, we don't get complacent in any way, and we work more than we've ever done before, even more than the last two years when we've won championships."
At the root of Norris' doubts is McLaren's low-speed cornering performance. His big advantage in qualifying in Zandvoort came in the circuit's many high-speed sections -- notably Turns 7 and 8 -- where he was comfortably clear of the Mercedes drivers. But in the slow-speed sections he was losing time all weekend, which he also attributed to Charles Leclerc's ability to overtake him for second place in Saturday's sprint race.
"Certainly, the slow speed is still our biggest weakness, especially just this tight, twisty stuff," Norris said. "The kind of more flowing corners, we're not so bad at. You know, there's still some slow speed in Budapest, but the fact it's a little bit more open and flowing, but still slow speed, things were better there. But as soon as it kind of gets proper tight and twisty, this is when the car doesn't like it.
"If we can improve on these slow speeds, I'm confident that I can win every race this season. If we don't, then it's much more difficult to believe so."
The next round of the season is in two weeks at Monza, which is famous for its long straights and slow-speed chicanes. The combination will likely be a double whammy for McLaren, which has also struggled for straight-line speed performance this year because of its relatively high levels of aerodynamic drag.
"If we think of the demands of Zandvoort and Hungary and then we think about the demands of Monza, we are in a completely different regime," McLaren team principal Andrea Stella said Sunday. "I think if we can confirm our improvements in Monza, then I would say we can look with some optimism at the remainder of the season, but first of all we need to go to Monza and see that our car can express a good performance in the long straights.
"We know that drag is not necessarily a point of strength of our car and, for instance, there's a lot of braking which is not necessarily a point of strength of our car. So there's a lot of things that we need to confirm as we head on to the next race."
An upgrade race
Even if Monza does provide the promise that McLaren can be fast at a wide range of circuits, Norris and his team are not chasing a stationary target. Mercedes' car development this season has been conspicuous by its absence as it has opted to bring fewer major upgrade packages in the first half of the season than main rivals Ferrari and McLaren.
Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff insists his team simply doesn't have the headroom in the budget cap to match its rivals, but he also hinted that Mercedes may have saved its biggest performance steps for the second half of the season.
"We haven't got the money to put developments on the car [at the rate of Ferrari and McLaren in the first half of the year]," Wolff said. "I said before that we are trying to evenly split that through the season based on our calculations of when we can bring the biggest updates and optimizing the championship points, but we just can do what we can do.
"That's why it is a development race. If you bring an upgrade, each of the top teams will have a couple of tenths in it, at least, and that's what we lose. So yeah, the ride is going to be tougher than at the beginning of the year. But you will see if toward the end of the season they are going to be able to deploy as much stuff onto the car as they do now. Someone might have a different strategy in spending more at the beginning and in the middle of the year than toward the end."
Wolff not only sees Norris' recent performance as a threat but also that of Antonelli's closest non-Mercedes rival, Hamilton. While Wolff acknowledged the performance of McLaren at the past two races, he also pointed out that both circuits have historically been strong for the papaya cars.
"I mean, I'm absolutely conscious of the threat," he said. "It's not only Norris, it's also even if you look at the gap of 50 points to Lewis. That's something we need to be worried about. So this is going to be tough. It could become tighter. And we just need to do the optimum job every single session, every single weekend. And I think we as an organization are good enough to win races.
"[McLaren] have won two now on tracks where they have been very, very good in the previous years also. So let's see if we can regain some momentum at the next races."